Face Off!

Game review

Face Off! is quite good hockey simulator, where in addition to classical playing hockey matches, you can also fistfight. Face Off! didn't have haven't made a deal aboua licensing rights with the leadership of the NHL, so the names of all players and teams are fictional. The advantage is that the names of teams and players can be changed, so you can freely rename all of them. As I said, it's not just about hockey, you can fight on ice and you can play under different rules - realistic rules, relaxed rules or no rules at all (let the massacre begin). The game also includes some little possibilities for coaching, you can edit individual formations, set the tactics, but primarily this is about hockey. You can choose either a friendly match, play the whole league, or directly go to the playoffs and try to win the Stanley Cup.

Face Off! offered several interesting options right in the opening menu, which the series from EA had not offered for many years and some options had never been offered on PC. In addition to the obligatory choice of how long the third period would last, you could also choose how many players would play (one on one, three on three or five on five), you also chose how much the referee would whistle (everything, only fouls or nothing but goals) what the game speed and difficulty will be, whether you want to use shot-cam and battles and if you played in two players, whether you will play against each other or together as a team.

The game offered the option to play just one game or the entire season. So it was not possible to play only the playoffs. It was possible to modify individual formations and even entire strategies even before the start of the match. What was most important, however, was that in Face Off you could completely rewrite all the names - of players and clubs. And of course a lot of guys took advantage of it. Even at home, the GHL, as the competition was called in this game, was modified to the Czech extra league, which was supplemented by several of the best teams from the lower competition. My friends and I tried to adjust the rosters for the current NHL year or representative selections. But even the original rosters had something in them. Last month, I went out for a beer with a friend from my youth, and somehow we got talking about Face off! and he immediately fired the trio of names Bojer, Maher, Carpenter, which I guess were the centers of Los Angeles, one of the strongest teams in the whole game.

If anything Face off! excelled for its time, then it was a two-player game. On the one hand, the game was easily controlled by two people at one keyboard, when the first player had the keys around the letter S and the second played on the numeric keypad. Apart from the movement keys, all other actions were controlled by just one other key. If you were in possession of the puck, you passed the puck by tapping and holding the direction, and shooting while holding. If your hockey player wasn't at the puck, he tapped to tell himself about a pass or tried to turn the opponent for the puck, while holding up his hands with the stick as if doing a cross. Especially funny were the situations where one of the guys, who was not in possession of the puck, pressed the action key, and his dribbling player drove across the ice like a tank, mowing down everything in his path (including the referee). We were always amused that, although it was always a clear cut, sometimes the referee sent him off for possession, other times for tripping and the like. The peculiarity about passing was that if you had offsides, your teammates would get to the puck in your defensive zone, while you and your player were hanging around somewhere in the opponent's third, so if you tapped a pass and your teammates heard you, you could change the location of the hockey player you controlled and the pass changed direction during the journey to find your player.

Face Off! has aged a lot. But it was a great game of hockey in its time, and thanks to the great multiplayer, it was worth turning it on occasionally even after the first NHL came out.